Norway’s Coast Seafood buys Danish salmon business

The Norwegian exporter Coast Seafood has bought Denmark’s Vega Salmon for an undisclosed figure.

Danish Vega Salmon has an annual production of around 25,000 tonnes of salmon, revenues of approximately 1.3 billion Danish kroner (DKK) (£155m) a year and employs between 400 and 600 people, depending on seasonal demand.

The company has its headquarters in Kolding, Denmark, but its main processing facility is in Handewitt in northern Germany.

Coast Seafood (pictured) said the acquisition is a new step towards expanding its presence in the entire value chain, after they bought the fish processing company Sotra Fiskeindustri in 2021.

Coast CEO Sverre Søraa said: “Vega Salmon is a well-managed company operating according to the highest quality standards. With Vega as part of the Coast family, we will be very well positioned to increase the export of processed salmon to the global market.”

Vega Salmon CEO Jakob Graasbøll Enemark said:“We look forward to becoming a part of Coast Seafood and have been impressed by their attention to quality and sustainable operations, as well as their professionalism. Vega and Coast is a good match both with respect to values and culture.”

Vega Salmon has capacity to increase production. Its products include fresh and frozen salmon, cold smoked, hot smoked, marinated salmon as well as value-added products and salmon off-cuts.

Vega was established in 2004 at a time when the fish processing industry was mostly competing on price, and where cost cutting was the name of the game.

Quality, food safety and sustainability were buzzwords, which seldom made it to the cooling disks, as price concerns dominated.

The company quickly realised that the game needed to change. Consumers were becoming more demanding about quality and food safety, and the world needed a more gentle way to produce food.

So, it set out to find a way to deliver better quality in a sustainable way while maintaining competitive cost levels.

The answer was to combine the latest technology with lean production principles. It designed a unique, new processing facility just over the Danish border in Handewitt, Germany, which opened in 2012 as one of the world’s most advanced fish processing factories.